>>37181543We made it through. Good news is, better than last time! But just barely.
Surprisingly we didn't lose anyone through the actual E4 matches. Took a while with a lot of swapping around to circumvent enemy status ailments, but each of them went down with no major losses and even left us with healing items to spare. But of course, we then got to Steven. Surprisingly after leading in with Skarmory, he didn't immediately try to just beat us down with Metagross, and I'm wondering if maybe that would have been better. Instead we got caught up in fights with the likes of Claydol, Cradilly and Armaldo that either wore many down or took them out - namely Sharpedo, Hariyama and Lunatone. In the end it came down to our aces, his Metagross and Swampert. We did prevail, but not without an intense fight. Actually managed to tank a Hyper Beam hit that dropped us into the red with barely 13 HP to spare. In the end, just wasn't fast enough to prevent us from dropping the hammer on it.
So that's Sapphire down, and with my starter still alive! Feels good. Will be moving on fairly soon to a new game, mulling over what to do next. As of now, I'm a little burnt out on Hoenn so I might decide to go as I said with original release order and start up FRLG.
